We sit for I don’t know how long before the sound of the bedroom door groaning open floats down the stairs toward us. Not a word from Tripp. Just his silent invitation.
When we climb the stairs together to join him, he’s lying at the center of the bed with a knee pulled up. Fingers tap against his rib cage in time to music playing through a pair of headphones that sit over his ears. This, I’ve seen before. The last time, it was a police officer lying on top of him. This time, it’s Julia and I who drape our bodies over his.
No words pass between the three of us while we lie there, holding him.
That ever-present voice of grief in the back of my mind which forces me to think of my own parents tells me that maybe, in some way, they’re holding me, too.
My eyes drift shut, and when they open again, warm sunlight is spilling into the room.
Julia’s body is wrapped around mine, her hand tucked beneath my waistband, with Tripp no longer occupying the space in between us. At the foot of the bed, in a rare occurrence, Drumstick and Koda have curled themselves together, deep in a peaceful sleep. The closet door is cracked open and, aside from Julia’s quiet sleeping sounds and the hum of the hardworking air conditioner, the house is silent.
Sliding my body out from underneath Jules, I creep out of the room and down to the kitchen with a yawn, scratching at my chest.
“Did you get any sleep?” I call out to no answer.
A torn piece of scrap paper on the table catches my eye, and as I pick it up to read Tripp’s hurried scrawl, my heart pounds against my chest.
He’s gone.
Chapter 32
TRIPP
I’ll regret this.
As I stare at the expansive building towering in front of me, my eyes slide toward the uppermost windows and I pull in a long breath. I’m probably only imagining the haunting organ music and the call of crows screaming their warnings from high up in the tree tops.
Behind the massive double doors and their frosted windows inlaid with swirls of iron, stands a phantom nearly forgotten. She’s older now, and it shows in salt and peppered hair and deep crow’s feet that crinkle next to her eyes when she grins widely at me.
A quick look thrown over her shoulder grants her the freedom to close the distance between us, and before I can blink, her arms are thrown tightly around my shoulders.
“What are you doing back here?” I ask her as I clap a hand against her back.
“I was asked back after—” She sighs. “After you were asked to leave.”
Carla was let go only a few days after my parents found a puke bowl that we’d hidden under Brody’s bed when he was goingthrough his first rounds of chemo. She’d interrupted my folks handing out my discipline and told them that she was the one who’d given it me to keep for him.
Forcing her out of the house wasn’t just her punishment, but mine, too.
“Mrs. Montgomery is in the lounge,” she tells me. “I’ll send her out for you.”
“Thanks, C.” With a look down the hall to the looming space behind her, I dip my head before offering her a smile. “Take care of yourself, okay? You’re ever in Miami, I want you to look me up.”
Her fingers meet my cheek, pinching it between them like she used to do when I was a kid, and the only adult who may have ever cared about me in this house disappears in search of the one who gave birth to me.
Molly rounds the corner minutes later, dressed to the nines as she always is, her hair styled and her makeup done as if she’s on her way to some kind of photo shoot.
“Tripp,” she says with a sigh, her brows stitched together as her arms cross at her chest. “I asked you to visit at the hospital, not at our home.”
“A bedside is a bedside when you’re family, right?” I ask, throwing on a saccharine smile as I shoulder past her.
I thought that by now, I would have forgotten the way that it smells in this house. That all of the memories I thought I still had would have been wrong. Wiped away.
Boy, was I fucking wrong.
The runner on the floor of the foyer is different, and so is much of the art hung on the walls, but everything else is the same as I remember it. The same polished hard wood sits beneath my feet. The same wallpaper that was put up after my brother was dragged through the house covers the walls.
The only thing missing is that stupid ficus.
